Nplg Catalog MCP Server

@pipeworx/nplg-catalog

The union catalogue and the digital library of the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia — Georgian bibliographic records with their MARC intact, plus a small full-text digital collection.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• nplg_search(query, index?, scope?, offset?) — search the union catalogue by keyword / title / author / subject. Returns a true total (not a page count) plus 50 brief citations, each with its permanent Sierra bib_id, title (Georgian with the parallel Latin title split out where the record carries one), author, imprint, material type and a stable catalogue URL. scope 1-11 narrows by material — books, periodicals, maps, dissertations, archival documents, newspaper and journal articles.
• nplg_record_marc(bib_id) — one record as parsed MARC: leader, control fields, and every data field with its indicators and subfields kept separate, plus a flattened summary (title, authors, imprint, languages, classification, subjects, host item). The 041 language codes and the parallel Georgian/English 245 survive as structure rather than as one string.
• nplg_dlibrary_search(query, collection?, page?) — the digital library: scanned print archive, dissertations and posters, each hit with authors, date of issue, a full source citation, subject headings in Georgian/Russian/English, a Dewey subject and a stable item URL.

Auth

Keyless. Every request answers without a credential.

A Sierra REST API v6.1.0 is live at catalog.nplg.gov.ge/iii/sierra-api/v6/ and 401s without a library-issued client key/secret (OAuth2 client credentials, exchanged at /v6/token). Asking NPLG for one would turn every HTML parse in this pack into a supported JSON API and change nothing else about its shape.

Data sources

• https://catalog.nplg.gov.ge/search*eng/X?SEARCH=…&searchscope=1&SORT=D — the union catalogue, Innovative Interfaces Sierra behind the classic WebPAC Pro front end (Server: III 100).
• https://catalog.nplg.gov.ge/search~S<scope>*eng?/X<q>…/<first>%2C<total>%2C<total>%2CB/browse — III's native offset cursor.
• https://catalog.nplg.gov.ge/search*eng/.b4972685/.b4972685/1%2C1%2C1%2CB/marc — per-record MARC, | as the subfield delimiter.
• http://www.nplg.gov.ge/dlibrary/search.html?qs=…&co=0&pg=1 — the digital library. co is the collection (0 all, 1 print archive, 2 dissertations, 3 posters), pg the 1-based page of 10.

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover the hard way

The phrase indexes do not return records. /search*eng/t, /a and /d answer 200 with an alphabetical list of headings and zero brief citations — a title search that looks like it returned nothing. Records come from the keyword index with III's own field qualifier inside the query: t:(tbilisi), a:(abashidze), d:(tbilisi). That is what index: does here.

The offset cursor carries the result total in the URL, and lying to it still returns rows. The 51,2896,2896,B triple is first,last,total. Pass a total that is not the search's and you still get a 200 with records, under a header reporting a total that belongs to nothing — a page that is right about the rows and wrong about the size of what it is paging through. So an offset request reads the real total from the first page before asking for the offset; it costs one extra request and is the only way to page honestly.

The ~S<scope> in the cursor path must match searchscope=. They are the same number in two places and the path one is what actually scopes the browse.

Georgian arrives as numeric character references. Most of the markup is მ rather than UTF-8, and MARC punctuation comes through as &#59; / ". An entity decoder that only knows & and friends returns mojibake that still parses cleanly.

A no-hit search is a 200 carrying "NO ENTRIES FOUND" plus a did-you-mean block, never a 404. The pack reports total: 0 with a note; anything else that parses to zero records is raised as an error, because a silently empty list is indistinguishable from a layout change.

Brief citations have one or two citation lines, and one means no author. A record without a 100 field shows only its imprint, so reading the first line as the author gets you "თბილისი, 2023." filed as a person.

MARC column positions are load-bearing. Tag 0-2, indicators 4-5, data from 7, wrapped lines indented 7. Any tag-stripping that substitutes a space shifts the columns and every field comes out one character wrong.

/search*geo labels the MARC leader ლიდერი and the result header in Georgian; /search*eng says LEADER and Keywords (1-50 of 2896). The records are identical either way, so the pack asks for the English interface purely so the labels are stable.

Dead ends, so nobody re-walks them

• dspace.nplg.gov.ge — a DSpace instance that would ship OAI-PMH and a REST API if it were up. It returned 503 from Apache on every path on 2026-09-10 morning and 404 from Apache on every path (/, /rest/communities, /server/api, /oai/request?verb=Identify, /jspui/) when re-probed the same day. Still no application behind the web server; the failure just changed shape. Worth re-probing before anyone assumes the digital-library half of this pack is as good as it gets.
• www.nplg.gov.ge/ec/ka/* — the older electronic catalogue, 403.
• geoclassic.nplg.gov.ge — a WooCommerce shop for Georgian classical music. It does expose wp-json, but it is a store, not a catalogue.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nplg-catalog": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nplg-catalog/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nplg-catalog/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nplg_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"tbilisi"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nplg_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-nplg-catalog is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nplg-catalog/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nplg-catalog": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-nplg-catalog"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Nplg Catalog data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT